Better Social Media Engagement Tops Marketers' Wish List

With the holidays coming – yes they are coming and will be here before you know it. And in case you’re curious, my favourite colour is blue and I’m partial to cashmere, just in case you want to start your holiday shopping now.

But we marketers and advertisers know full well of course that the holidays are indeed fast approaching so I figured why not share the results of a recent survey conducted by Awareness which revealed the #1 thing marketers have on their wish list this holiday season. Ok, it really didn’t show all that, I added in the holiday part but play along with me.

Now when something, anything scores higher than generating revenue you know it’s pretty significant and the fact that 78% of marketers selected “better customer engagement” over “revenue generation” speaks volumes to me. No scratch that. It screams volumes to yours truly.

Back in June I wrote an article entitled Engagement Marketing Fever – Are Marketers Finally Catching It? Perhaps, just perhaps the “malaise” I spoke of has become an epidemic among marketers? While some may scoff at the notion that increasing revenue should always be the top priority, many will see the forest through the trees and realise that better customer engagement via social media will lead to increased revenue when done correctly of course. But again, I know that many will openly question that logic and insist that the bottom line should always be at the top of every marketer’s wish list. So let the scoffing begin.

There’s one additional finding from the Awareness survey, which is quite wide in scope and I absolutely recommend you downloading it and reading it.

The other finding I want to share is this somewhat disconcerting graph below:

What makes this particular finding is, well, here’s right from the horse’s, er. survey’s mouth “While brands are still measuring their total number of fans and followers and traffic to website, more meaningful metrics are bubbling to the front of the pack, like share of social conversations and social influence. Sentiment still lags behind as a measure of effectiveness.”

The authors of the survey chose to look at this from a glass half-full angle “more meaningful metrics are bubbling to the front of the pack” whereas I look at it from the half-empty side “While brands are still measuring their total number of fans and followers” of the ledger. Companies, brands, etc. who are still measuring their social media effectiveness by the number and size of their fans, followers and likes are truly misguided and quite antiquated in their thinking. Somehow the whole “quality over quantity” is still lost on many marketers.